Friday, April 5, 2013

I don't know about your schools, but ours is very large. I get quite the workout when I go and pick up my primary students. When I first started teaching I felt like I was losing a lot of time transitioning in the hall to pick up my students, so I wanted to maximize our time together. This is where my "Word of the Week" comes into play!

When I was tutoring in the America Reads program, a teacher taught me that you teach your students where to stop in the hallways. This helps with managing your class (i.e. prevents those huge gaps in line, allows you to keep an eye on all of your students, and makes them wait for you when you have to stop and briefly talk to another teacher) Therefore, I placed these "Word of the Week" posters at all of my stopping points along the way to my classroom. The reasoning is two fold. One, it allows me to manage my groups better. Two it maximizes their learning time with me because of the words I place on the posters for them to practice reading. The words I use range from simple sight words to different types of syllables.

Below is an example of my posters:

I took the template and taped it to a large piece of construction paper and then laminated it. Masking tape is all you need to hang these puppies up! I laminated the word cards for durability and put velcro on the back of them so I can easily switch them out from week to week.

Some wonderful colleagues of mine made all of the Preprimer, Primer, First and Second grade word cards. They were nice enough to share them with me and gave me permission to post them on my blog. So a special thank you goes out to Connie LaCoe and Stacey Shaffer!

So next time you are walking down the hall to take your class somewhere or pick some one up for small group instruction, ask yourself how much time did it take you and how could you better utilize that time?